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It comes like a wave of drunken courage. As a person educated on the negative effects of alcohol on the human body, and as a minor, Kei herself has no intimate experience with alcohol, but that's the thing: that's what helps her tell this particular attraction from the others she's felt before. She didn’t know, and now she suddenly knows, and it’s without any external help that she knows, and (she laughs, ruefully, scornfully) isn’t it oh-so-magical?
Watching girls from afar all her life should have prepared her for this, one would believe, but she learns now that attraction is intense, and singular, and too much, that she could have never been prepared.
She gets a whiff of how it’s supposed to feel when she doesn’t just look at, but sees Kageyama's hands for the first time. Once she’s started, her eyes keep darting back to catch hold of the evasive feeling, and the vague outline of that feeling takes a more and more certain shape in her mind before it goes down to light its fire in her abdomen. She can tell the tingling at her neck has a direct connection to the jungle-wild beating of a dumbstruck heart in her chest. When she can follow the open-close-open-close of Kageyama's eyes through the movement of eyelashes in her peripheral vision, and when she can't tear her eyes apart from Kageyama's steady fingers always delivering with utmost precision, when she slowly decodes the palpitation in her chest—a response to the shadow of Kageyama's hands on her skin—Kei realises what she feels is attraction.
Thinking Kageyama was cute was one thing. It was purely innocent when Kei’s eyes lingered on Kageyama’s graceful form. She’d convinced herself it was so.
This is more than innocent. This is desire, this is selfish, this is alarming. She’s looking at Kageyama’s hands, when the wave hits, and she can just take them in hers if she simply reaches out. It’d feel so good, their energies on the court so in sync, Kageyama wouldn’t ever think of questioning what was happening.
Having another's hand in her hand is no new concept to her; Yamaguchi has a problem with keeping hers to herself, after all. Kei is so accustomed to Yamaguchi's hands in hers she barely registers them as another's hands anymore. Everyone else is foreign territory, though, and "friendly" is the last thing Kei would like to be known as, so she doesn't lend her hand to anyone else easily; religiously refrains from borrowing anyone else's.
She is who she is, adorned with thorns, sharp tongue at the ready under smug lips. She is who she is, but mustn’t the fact that she wants to break down her own walls, overcome her own barriers, mean Kageyama might be worth bridging the gap between them?
When she closes her hands on Kageyama’s with the excuse of taking the volleyball from her, squeezes in reassurance that things are okay, they’re fine, it doesn’t do justice to the hope sprouting in her heart at the idea of lacing fingers, feeling knuckles with fingertips. But it’s a beginning, a sound basis laid by tentativity, slow but sure as the two of them have always been.